April March - In Cinerama (2022) [Hi-Res]

April March has quite the resume: an animator on Pee Wee’s Playhouse and for Madonna’s “Who’s That Girl” video, and collaborating with Brian Wilson, Jack White, LL Cool J, Jonathan Richman, Ronnie Spector and Bertrand Burgalat. But she also has an acclaimed recording career, heavily influenced by French pop music, making a name for herself in France with her self-produced albums as well as albums with Bertand Burgalat and Aquaserge.

She named her English version of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Laisse tomber les filles” “Chick Habit,” and Quentin Tarantino featured it in his 2007 film, Death Proof.

Following a quarter century of recording, March unveiled In Cinerama as a vinyl-only release for Record Store Day in 2021. It was an unprecedented success, selling out of its small run before most could hear the magic. In Cinerama has a wide sonic span from Nigeria to California, with Fela Kuti’s drummer Tony Allen at the helm and The Beach Boys’ Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford by his side, as well as talented friends ranging from the French underground to Nashville; The 11 tracks, co-written and co-produced by Mehdi Zannad, recall the 5th Dimension, Belle And Sebastian and even your favorite Gainsbourg or Curt Boettcher productions but stand on their own just as fresh and contemporary as the waves of Malibu or a Parisian Uber.

Omnivore Recordings will issue a revamped In Cinerama on CD and Digital on March 18, 2022, with updated artwork, new liner notes (both in English and en Français), printed lyrics, plus two previously unissued bonus tracks (“Goodbye” and “Friends Peculiar”).

As Christophe Conte writes in the notes: “In Cinerama is an active medley of images and sounds inherited from pop’s golden age, made not into a nostalgic mirror of times gone by but a vital, vibrant material. In the movies as in music, time stands still. Actors and actresses, singers, musicians, and moments fixed in wax and celluloid exist forever. They are the stuff of our mythologies, both personal and communal; they live in greater, more beautiful, and more exhilarating countries than any real ones we will ever visit… April March, Mehdi Zannad, and their magnificent entourage give us one such stationary voyage, an ideal map to admire down to the tiniest detail, a world we dream of inhabiting.”

The updated In Cinerama is the perfect way to get acquainted with this influential and important artist. But, mostly, it’s a way to experience one of 2021’s most acclaimed releases.